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April 23, 2021 - Dinesh D'Souza
01:13:33
MAN OF STEELE Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep 75
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Coming up, a special episode, an in-depth conversation on race with scholar and author Shelby Steele.
Shelby Steele is a fellow at the Hoover Institution.
He's written a bunch of important books, the content of our character, White Guilt.
We'll be talking about police shootings.
We'll be talking about white supremacy and systemic racism.
We'll be talking about critical race theory, the whole gamut.
it. This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
The times are crazy, and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
Welcome to the podcast, Shelby.
You and I are former colleagues at the Hoover Institution.
If I remember, we were on the Hoover cruise together many years ago now.
I was also delighted to meet your wife, Rita, and spend some time together and swap ideas.
So it's been a little while.
I should tell you, Debbie and I watched your movie that's directed by your son, What Killed Michael Brown.
We loved it. It was just beautifully shot, and kudos to your son for that.
But it was also, I think, an almost lyrical narrative that went with the terrific cinematography.
So just a terrific movie all around.
I'm going to be commending it to people watching this podcast and telling them how they can watch it.
But I want to... I think the best way to get people interested in the movie is to just talk about the world around us, because it's been one thing, as you know, after another.
Your movie deals, of course, with it's built around a police shooting, so it couldn't be more timely.
But let's start, if we can, with the most iconic of all the police killings, at least of our time now, which is George Floyd.
It seemed to me that there is a real kind of discrepancy between the public narrative surrounding the George Floyd killing and the facts as they emerged in the case.
Now, the discrepancy is actually not over the brutality of the killing.
I think not even over the inexcusability of it, but over the role of race in it.
And that's what I thought I would start by asking you about.
In the public narrative is all about race, a white cop, a black victim.
In the trial itself, it appears like neither the prosecution nor the defense highlighted race, which in a way is odd in a murder trial because motive is obviously relevant.
And so if it were part of Derek Chauvin's motive, I'm going to get a black guy, I'm a white supremacist, this is an expression of my ideology, you'd think it would come up, but it almost never did.
So let me ask you straight out, do you think that this was a race case?
How do you read the trial and what happened to George Floyd?
Well, I think what happened to George Floyd and the trial had nothing in the world to do with race.
And yet, race was the sort of the atmosphere, the world in which this, I think rather, I mean, in a sense, it was just a horrible, horrible event.
Tragedy and so forth.
The fact that race came into it is what people, in a sense, use this event to hunt for.
It's what I think of as a kind of hunting for, combing the ground for racism.
Are you saying that race was sort of superimposed onto the event while the event itself inherently didn't have that built into it?
That's right. You know, people labored hard around the world to make this into an event of black suffering, black victimization at the hands of white racism.
That's the sort of archetypal framework that was, I think, at work here.
And there's a frustration because we didn't find it.
I don't think racism was involved in the, from what we can tell from the testimony and so forth, there's just no, if it was, there's nothing to indicate it, no evidence of it.
So you're saying that as far as you're concerned, it doesn't seem to me you're disputing the verdict per se, but you're sort of saying that Chauvin seems to be the kind of guy who would have done it to someone else, whether they were white or black.
There's nothing to refute that.
There's nothing to say otherwise.
Here he is with his knee on somebody's neck, and he keeps it nine minutes beyond any sort of reasonable explanation at all.
Well, and so therefore, it was so extravagantly ugly and evil That, you know, if there was anything that was racist, it would have come out.
We would have seen it.
I mean, it was ugly in its own right.
And so again, there was nothing to indicate that race played the slightest role in it.
So it's much more a measure of the neurosis around race in America than it is anything else.
I want to come and get into that in some depth, but before I do that, let's see if the same thing is true in the Makia Bryant case in Columbus, Ohio.
You have cops who are called to the scene, and it happens to be, in this case, a white cop.
He comes to the scene. He sees young Makia Bryant, age 16, black, with a knife, lunging at another black girl, obviously also a young black girl.
He draws his weapon.
He shoots her.
He kills her. Now, I think what interests me about this is that a whole bunch of people, and I could kind of use LeBron James as kind of a stand-in for this public outrage surrounding this incident.
It seems like for LeBron James, it was a very simple way to look at it.
There's a white cop, so we start off with the premise that it's a race case.
And he's the villain.
Since he's the villain, Makia Bryant must be the victim.
And as for the other girl, she shall remain nameless.
We don't even really care about her because all that matters is that a white cop shot a black girl and an underage black girl.
It seems to me that what that misses, and I'd like to get your take on it, is...
Where's the real victim of this?
This was the girl who was about to be seriously wounded, if not killed, and if you put her center stage, then Makia Bryant becomes the perpetrator, and the cop is coming to the rescue of a black girl who is about to be grieving.
So the cop should be a hero by that logic to Black Lives Matter, and yet that's not the way it's seen, is it?
No, but you're absolutely right.
Normally it would be seen that the cop would be a hero.
He saved a girl's life who was weaker and was unarmed.
And the girl who was attacking her obviously had a knife and clearly had an intent to kill.
And so he rescued that girl.
And that would have been the end of it, except for the fact that he, the cop, was white.
And so here again we go into this American obsession, this neurotic obsession with hunting, longing for racism.
It's as though we want it.
We don't care about any of the principles in this incident.
We don't want to know about their family background, their child.
We know nothing. What we're looking for here is racism.
I mean, what I find even more amazing is the fact that where facts don't exist, they have to be invented.
I mean, here was Valerie Jarrett, for example, saying, this was a knife fight, as if you have two girls with knives who are kind of poised in a kind of gladiatorial contest.
No, I mean, Makia Bryan had a knife.
The other girl was unarmed.
So this was not a knife fight, but it had to be made into a knife fight to say, hey, cops, you need to stay out.
Yeah. It's what I call poetic truth.
It's where you rewrite the incident in a way that serves your politics, your ideology, your need for power in some way.
You make the story.
Now, this is...
Shelby, this is, I think, a very key term in your movie, poetic truth versus, you may say, objective truth, or what really happened.
When we come back, I want to jump into the Michael Brown case to look at the discrepancy between poetic truth and the real truth.
We'll be right back. I'm back with my friend, author and scholar and movie maker now, Shelby Steele.
Shelby, we were talking about the Derek Chauvin case, the Makia Bryant killing.
I want to now turn to Michael Brown because you were on the scene.
You looked into this in some depth.
Now, the word about Michael Brown was that he had been gratuitously shot by a white policeman.
And in fact, this gave rise to the whole, almost you could call it a cult, of hands up, don't shoot.
Of course, the mythology was that Michael Brown had his hands up and the cop just drew his weapon, bam, bam, bam.
Now, Describe first, if you will, the objective facts of the situation, and then I want to get to what you call the poetic truth.
What actually happened? That's important to know, yes.
What actually happened is Michael Brown was walking down the middle of the street with a friend of his.
In the middle of the day, they had just been in a convenience store, a market, liquor store, and had stolen some cigarettes, some cigarillos.
And they were, again now, a few minutes later, walking down the middle of the street, provocatively, and policemen spotted them, Darren Wilson, and pulled over and asked them if they wouldn't move onto the sidewalk,
please. What happened immediately there, no one really can remember, but almost instantly, Michael rushed the police car, an SUV, reached in, grabbed the policeman, then turned around, hit him as hard as he could in the jaw with his fist, and then began to wrestle him for the gun, the policeman's gun.
Finally, the policeman managed to keep the gun, and Michael turned around to run away, ran away, oh, maybe 20 yards or so, and then turned around And balled his fist up and charged back at the policeman,
and during which time the policeman was shouting, stop, and kneel down on the ground.
Michael completely ignored him.
Continued to charge him.
Again, you have to remember, this is a 300-pound teenager.
This is a formidable figure.
Charged the policeman. Finally, the policeman, after many warnings, said stop, saying stop, finally shot Michael.
Hit him once. Bullet made no difference.
Hit him again. This went on.
He kept charging him. Got to within about eight feet, which is very close in this situation.
And the police shot him about three more times.
So I think it was a total of seven in all to bring him down.
That's what happened. So you draw the conclusion in the film, and I think this was by and large ultimately what not only the authorities, but even the Obama administration concluded.
Namely, this was A, not a case of hands up, don't shoot.
That was just flatly false.
And number two, it seems that you're saying that the officer's conduct was justified under the circumstances.
Obviously a tragic outcome nevertheless, but that he in a way had no choice in that situation.
Is that your conclusion?
Yes, the officer shot in self-defense.
The officer showed at every sort of turn in this incident self-restraint, beyond which some of the eyewitnesses said in court, I would have shot him a long time before that.
I wouldn't have let him get that close to me.
He's big and he looks like he wants to kill somebody.
And if he got the officer's gun, he probably would have.
Or he likely would have.
So the officer really had no choice but to defend himself finally at the last moment.
And that was...
All of course rewritten, but the truth is, the objective truth, is that Michael provoked his own death, sadly, tragically.
Again, the tragedy deepens when we consider these young men as human beings, as an 18-year-old kid and drifting in the world on a 100-degree afternoon, not clear about where he's going to sleep that night, his body already filled with drugs of one kind or another.
In a sort of existential malaise.
And out of this comes this bizarre, absurd expression of violence.
Attacks of policemen.
How many people attack a policeman?
Hit the policeman? Such that you can see the bruise for days.
And then, again, Point is, this is a human being in collapse, in full collapse.
And that's, again, a part of the story that bothers me, that never gets looked at.
Why? Again, our interest in this film was, what really killed Michael Brown?
It was not really, you know, Darren Wilson may have pulled the trigger, but what forces were at work that ended his life in that sort of blaze of self-destruction?
I think it's a very profound question.
When we come back, I'm going to ask Shelby Steele, how do poetic truths run away from objective truths?
How does the Michael Brown mythology get started?
And then second, what really did kill Michael Brown?
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I'm back with my friend Shelby Steele, author, movie baker.
Shelby, we were talking about Michael Brown, and you described the objective facts, which were presumably available fairly quickly after the incident upon the initial investigation, the eyewitnesses.
Can you tell me how does this poetic truth take on a life of its own where it's widely reported, it's widely believed, then idealistic young kids on campus act upon it, they start lighting candles, they go putting their hands up in the air.
This almost appears superstitious in the view of the actual facts.
I think what you're saying is that the reason that the mythology develops is that there is a, perhaps both on the part of whites and blacks, a deep psychological need to believe things even if those things are not in evidence.
Would that be a correct interpretation of how these poetic truths get manufactured?
Yes, I definitely think so.
You see that right away.
There's certain characters that almost immediately began to emerge in the Michael Brown case.
People who had been sort of famous Black militants, provocateurs all along, suddenly, miraculously, that same day appear on the scene with hanging from their neck a noose Sort of being evocative of the history of lynching of Blacks in America and saying that he was not shot, he was not killed, he was executed.
He was exterminated.
And so inducing, bringing in a language that reflects the historic oppression of Blacks in American slavery and all of that imagery sort of overlaid over this event.
So that it's not just a shooting anymore, a tragedy.
Now it is a historical, political statement of the relentlessness of Black persecution.
And how this is what has to be answered.
Rather than just fiddling over the details of the shooting, we need to understand this in the context of America's commitment to racism above all.
And so, in other words, I want some power out of this.
I want power.
I want to tell a story here that supports the Black movement for whatever, liberation, equality, whatever you want to call it.
And so I'm gonna make the incident into more racial evil.
Shelby, isn't it a fact that these racial incidents in the classic sense have got to be in fact, very rare for the simple reason that you wouldn't need to manufacture them.
You wouldn't need to alter a single fact.
Presumably in a big country, you could find innumerable gruesome examples of actual racism with no facts edited, with no kind of manipulation of what really happened.
But it seems to me it's the scarcity of those examples.
That leads people to say, okay, well, we got to make George Floyd into a racial case, and we got to make the McKee O'Brien situation racial, and we got to see the Michael Brown case through a racial lens.
It's almost as if racism today, the reason you need a metaphor, and you have to sort of scramble for the metaphor, is that the real thing itself seems elusive.
Would you agree?
I think you just hit the nail on the head.
Here's the reality.
The reality is that there's very little, there's no hard evidence at all to suggest that police today have a thing for black people and want to somehow be punitive to black people.
There's no hard evidence of that whatsoever.
The larger point is, and this I think goes to all sorts of aspects of race in American life, Black America today is absolutely, not closely, but absolutely free.
This longing of the former slave and the culture and the segregation and the discrimination and the long history of abuse and persecution and so forth, which we nobly somehow managed to endure and be alive today.
Is over with. There's no serious commitment whatsoever in American life today to persecute Black people systemically.
None. You can do anything you want as a black person.
You can become the President of the United States.
You can become a CEO of a major corporation.
You can open a shop anywhere you want.
You can rent or buy a house anywhere you have the money to do so.
If somebody turns you down, there's a whole body of law to support you.
And so what then, how do you keep going the idea that your victimization is the truth, is the truth that survives all, and that you need to be, in American life, you need to be rewarded for that victimization.
You need to get something from it, such that that victimization becomes your main sense of power.
So what the story after Michael Brown is killed and so forth is that everything becomes theater because there is no real oppression there.
I can walk out of this room right now, go to any hotel I want to.
Couldn't do that when I was a kid in segregated America.
I can now. I'm free.
That's a little scary to me.
We don't have a lot of practice with freedom.
Don't have the values to really confront it.
And so ironically, freedom shames us.
It says, we knew you weren't ready all along.
And it seems to confirm the horrible idea that we're inferior.
And so we have a very ambivalent relationship toward freedom.
A part of us doesn't want anything to do with it.
And so we keep, what do we keep doing?
We keep claiming that racism is relentless, that it is the world that we live in.
It controls everything.
It oppresses us and it controls us in every way.
I mean, what you're saying is that the allegation of racism, in a way, takes the place of the actual racist.
It makes me feel better.
I feel better when I think that racism is still around every corner in American life.
That's why my life is not going so well.
I realize now why.
I have this sort of existential excuse.
That this is the, I think, the most pernicious feature of Black American life today is this sort of clash with freedom that makes us hate freedom, makes us deny that we're free.
We're caught up in denying it constantly.
Poetic truth is the truth we tell to deny that we're freedom, that we're free.
And in that sense, we've become dependent on it.
And so it happens all over the country.
Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, Michael Brown, George Floyd, so forth, are all incidents where we just are aching to find the slightest drop of racism.
Because it's a bomb.
And it relieves that anxiety about thriving in a free world.
We got the biggest thing.
Watch out, you get what you want.
We got what we wanted.
And it's much more difficult than we thought it was going to be.
When we come back, I want to ask Shelby Steele just about these explosive statements that he's just made about suspicions of inferiority, the shock and threat of dealing with freedom.
And I also want to pivot to what's in it for whites.
Why is it that whites seem to be eager to play along with this theater as you describe it?
We'll be right back.
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Back with author and movie maker Shelby Steele.
Shelby, you were talking about the shock of freedom and perhaps even the gnawing suspicion of inferiority.
Let me ask you this question.
Do you think that as American society has become...
In a way, more meritocratic.
And by that, I mean, for example, it's not as easy to get into a college today just because your uncle went there or because you knew someone in the admissions office.
By and large, it's grades, it's test scores, it's what you can produce on your application.
And what you find in these colleges is that Not just whites, but Asian Americans are doing very well.
You have Asian Americans kind of on the top.
You then sort of have whites in the middle, then Latinos, then African Americans.
So the emergence of a kind of, you'd have to say, racial hierarchy, but not a hierarchy of oppression, but a hierarchy of merit.
Why? Because the Asian Americans aren't getting ahead by discriminating against anybody.
They're getting ahead by outperforming everybody.
And Is this what you mean when you say that there is a kind of fear that under meritocratic rules, a group like blacks is falling behind and therefore needs some explanation for, gee, why are we falling behind?
Answer, the tests must be biased, the administration must be biased, the professors must be biased, the university must be structurally racist.
So racism becomes the all-purpose explanation for something that is really...
Calling for, in your words, development.
Absolutely. Racism, you know, it becomes the...
It is the sort of...
It plays a mixed role, really.
But racism, again, is soothing.
I have said many, many times, many different occasions to Blacks, you're not really a victim of racism.
I remember when we were victims.
We're not today.
Don't tell me we are, because I know.
Almost nothing in the world makes them angrier than to be told that, because it says you have no excuses.
And you are underdeveloped.
I also make the point that after four centuries of arguably the most woeful instance of human oppression and persecution in all of history, you don't come out of that with the same level of development as the people who did that to you, the group that did that to you.
You just don't. How could you?
You've been kept. You were not allowed to learn to read.
You were punished for reading.
Frederick Douglass had to sneak underneath the house of his owner to learn how to teach himself to read.
Well, that is our problem, and it makes us less competitive.
It puts us at the bottom of most situations, most institutions that we enter.
We come in at the bottom.
You see this in universities, medical schools, so forth.
There we are. Well, rather than face the reality, Which I think we will ultimately do one way or another.
We make up these poetic truths that assuage all of that and say, you don't know.
I mean, this is what produced the term systemic racism.
It's invisible. You can't, you know, you won't be able to see it.
It's so subtle. It's unconscious.
It's, you know, but it's therefore all the more powerful and holds me down all the more relentlessly.
And so no, you don't know anything about that kind of suffering.
That, and so racism becomes an excuse.
What's in it for whites? It seems to me you have, you talk in your book, White Guilt, you talk about the concept of dissociation, which I think is a powerful idea.
You talk about the fact that for whites, there's a sort of psychological market in race, and it enables whites to regain the moral superiority that they lost when they were shamed into being erstwhile or former advocates of white supremacy.
So now, well, I'll let you explain it. Talk about how you see these indignant white kids sometimes screaming at black cops, and they say things like, you know, true, I don't experience racism, but it's very important for me to lecture this sort of representative of the system.
There's something very sick and yet interesting going on there.
Tell us what it is.
Well, I think that what it is is what I call white guilt.
And I don't mean actual literal feelings of guilt.
But by white guilt, I mean the terror, the literal terror for whites of being seen as a racist.
There's no worse thing a white American can be seen as than a racist.
That just puts you really beyond the pale.
So whites...
Whites did an absolutely brave thing in the 1960s.
America did a brave thing.
It owned up to its history.
It said, all right, yes, we had slavery.
We have discrimination everywhere.
We have segregation everywhere.
Blacks can only do this and they cannot do that.
And we have persecuted these people.
We confess.
We're not going to deny it anymore.
I don't know of a nation in history, a culture in history, that has had a braver moment than America's confession.
I call it the Great Confession in the 1960s.
Wow! I never thought growing up in America in the 50s and 60s, I never thought America would actually, that a president would actually acknowledge this history, but they did.
To their great credit, it was extraordinary bravery.
On the other hand, when you confess and own up to this horrible shame of this ruthless Oppression of another group of innocent people.
You lose moral authority.
From that point on, you lose the moral confidence to speak, to stand, to feel complete and full and whole.
You lose that.
And whites have not fully acknowledged since the 60s they have been functioning at a deficit of moral authority.
They have to keep proving themselves constantly that, no, we're not racist.
We're not us.
No, no, no. And, you know, my parents, my family, they just immigrated here one generation ago.
We didn't do anything. We didn't own slaves.
And it's just this constant, this They don't feel guilt.
They act guiltily, which is probably worse.
When we come back, I want to.
And so you pick the issue today and you put white guilt as going to be the variable that whites respond to.
And blacks then know that.
We know that whites have this vulnerability.
We know this is their weakness.
And thus blooms this black grievance industry, the Al Sharptons of the world, who come in and play that vulnerability like it was a violin.
And get whites to concede and to give forth all sorts of things.
Some people estimate since the 60s that, you know, 30-some trillion dollars has been spent by the government on social programs and public housing, school busing, the war on poverty, affirmative action, diversity, inclusion.
It just goes on and on with things that whites have spent money on.
To try to fill in that lost moral authority.
And it has hurt The nation as a whole, because it's weakened our capacity to respond to real problems.
Shall we take a pause? Let's take a pause here, because when we come back, we're going to go more into this kind of transaction between white guilt and you may say the opportunism of the black civil rights leadership and how that doesn't address real problems.
We'll be right back. Welcome to my show!
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I'm back with author and movie maker Shelby Steele.
Shelby, we were talking about white guilt and it seems to me you've given a sort of perfect explanation of why these woke CEOs of places like Delta Airlines and Coke and other places are jumping on board.
We're gonna move our business out of Georgia.
We're gonna move the game out of Georgia.
We're gonna not do contracts with Georgia.
Because the Georgia voter integrity law is, and I'm sure you regard this as a little preposterous, equated with Jim Crow, as if asking someone from an ID. I mean, you need an ID to get on Delta Airlines.
You need an ID to go to the Koch shareholders meeting.
You need an ID for 50 other things that aren't called racist.
But in this particular instance, it's racist.
Is that a phenomenon where these CEOs are terrified of the accusation of racism and will literally go to any lengths to avoid that stigma?
They are accused people.
They respond like accused.
Whites respond as though they...
And they are literally born into an accusation that they're evil, that they're racist.
So yes, they keep...
Coca-Cola makes this bizarre.
We won't do business with anybody who has less than 30% of their workforce has to be people of color.
We're innocent of racism.
Do you see how innocent we are?
This is how far we are willing to go.
It may cost us some money, but nevertheless, we'll go there anyway.
Of course, it never really cost them too much money.
But the history of America has brought...
What they need, literally, is innocence of that past.
They have to dissociate themselves, separate themselves from this America that practiced discrimination, segregation, slavery, and so forth.
This is how far we are guilty we feel about What we did and what happened and so forth.
And so they're the big variable because they have the money, the power, and they keep seducing Blacks.
The language of the day, they enable Blacks to keep trading on their victimization, their past victimization.
And so we get a rather sick, symbiotic relationship here between wealthy white America and this sort of grievance, constantly aggrieved minority America, and one shaking down the other, and so that our relationship, our racial relationship, becomes one basically of the shakedown.
And again, the huge problem that goes on there is the underdevelopment of blacks, of minorities.
So no matter how we play out this game with white guilt, we lose all over again because it's a game.
It's not real.
It doesn't address the underdevelopment we suffer from.
I mean, it's almost medieval what you're describing, you know, a market in indulgences that you pay for to get innocence in return.
I mean, it's almost like every time Al Sharpton comes to town or BLM, they've got these certificates of absolution in their pocket and they name a price and whites are buying these certificates of absolution that give them innocence.
But what you're saying is that they're not real investments in the black community.
They don't really buy anything other than a feel-good sentiment on the one hand.
And then Patrice Calores-Khan or whatever from BLM goes and buys four homes.
And you see Al Sharpton.
He's literally taking videos of himself walking to a private jet.
He goes, I'm on my way to Minneapolis.
And it's sort of like, you know, we now know who paid for that jet.
Yeah, yeah.
It's funny. I mean, it's absurd on its face.
And yet, white America created Al Sharpton.
White America said, we've got to have some blacks to pay off.
You're going to shake us down, then where do we send a check?
Well, there's Al Sharpton and his private jet.
There's BLM and their luxury homes that they're now buying and so forth with white guilt money.
And so white guilt then becomes the ticket to ride.
If you're Black, you get those scholarships.
You get that special attention.
If you say that you're not a victim of racism, You don't get a damn thing.
The minute you say you're a victim, and so the incentives are for you to keep selling yourself out.
When we come back, Shelby, I want to actually sort of step outside the theater and start looking at Michael Brown and the world of Michael Brown, because I think it's the world of George Floyd and it's the world of Makia Bryant.
It's the same world.
And I want to talk about that world and how we got there and how we lost the promise of the civil rights movement of the 1960s.
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I'm back with author Shelby Steele.
Shelby, we were talking about white guilt and I want to turn for a moment to what white guilt has purchased.
You mentioned a gigantic amount of effort and funds and programs and commitments that have been made over now almost half a century.
And yet, I would have to say, and I'm saying this really as a kid who grew up in a different part of the world, the outskirts of Bombay, India, but a third of a mile from my house, these massive slums which were thought to be, at the time at least, the worst slums in the world.
And here's my point.
It seems to me that if I had the choice, if I were forced to choose, I would rather be a slum kid in Bombay or in one of the favelas of Brazil than growing up on the inner city streets of Baltimore or Oakland.
In other words, kind of what I'm getting at is it seems to me, and you might disagree, that these inner cities, or at least certain neighborhoods of them, are literally the worst places on earth.
And the reason I say that is because if you pick a slum kid out of Bombay, bring him to the United States, offer him an education, Here's a school. Here's where you can get a job.
They would jump at it.
They would put in 20 hours a day.
In other words, what they lack is opportunity, but they don't lack work ethic.
They are raised in families.
If you see them now, they're poor, but they're smiling.
The point I want to get at is, how is it the case that this massive investment in the inner city has produced...
This evident nihilism that makes even people from other countries who grow up in materially poorer conditions realize something is very wrong here.
You betcha.
What you just described is the kind of world I grew up in.
In America, in a segregated, all-black community, black schools, black everything.
No integration allowed anywhere.
Yet my father Did everything he could possibly do.
He bought old run-down homes.
He rebuilt them.
He always had some sort of scheme that he was devoted to to make it work.
And he would constantly run into situations where banks didn't want to loan money to blacks.
He had to find his way around and through all of this sort of web that kept blacks Blacks down.
And yet I can remember when public housing became an issue in the 60s and they were building them everywhere.
He wouldn't even talk about it.
He thought they were a disgrace that any Black who took advantage of a public housing was shameful and lost standing.
And this was not just my father.
This was the whole community.
had these values.
And the idea of the fact that I was going to run into discrimination everywhere only meant that I had to work harder.
Not that I had to work less.
There was nobody paying us off.
We were completely on our own.
My father never got a single penny of government help in his entire life with third grade education.
It was all he ever had.
So that clearly what happened is in the 60s when America confessed its wrongdoing and became much, much more concerned and driven by its own need for moral redemption, its own restoration of moral authority.
So blacks then became a pawn in this game of white redemption.
All the social policies, they never looked to see whether these social policies helped Blacks.
More welfare, school busing, public housing and so forth, affirmative action.
They never looked to see whether they were actually working to help Blacks.
They were working to help America restore this lost moral authority.
And they still work in that way.
And of course, the price we pay for taking that bait, the price we pay is that we remain underdeveloped.
We are farther behind whites today than we were in the 1950s.
Blacks went to college in the 1950s with slightly lower grade point averages than whites.
They graduated four years later with slightly higher grade point averages than whites.
They ran into racism at every turn.
My history teacher sat me down one day and said he thought that it was just fundamentally wrong for blacks to be in college.
He would put up with me.
He would do his best to contain himself, but he thought it was only fair of him to admit that.
Well, that's the kind of world you ran into.
My father said, when I told him that story, that you go to college, you're a pirate.
You take everything you can get.
You take the highest kid in the class, not the black kid, the highest kid in the class, and you compete with him.
You get good.
You take what that college has got to offer and you move on.
Well, he didn't tell me, you know, that whites owed me this and whites owed me that and that if, you know, if I, you know, went to this program, if we only had another social program, if we only had this...
He would have laughed at that.
And again, the entire community was that way.
It was not just my father.
On the block that I grew up on, Melvin Van Peoples, the man who later on invented independent film in America.
Came out of that same neighborhood.
His father owned a gas station and had all sorts of other investments that he pursued.
The little girl next door became a big soap opera star in New York City.
There were all sorts of high achieving people in that world.
We were moving up. We were moving up.
We didn't predict that white world that was waiting for us.
And you, of course, became Shelby Steele.
When we come back, I want to talk to you about a critical moment when you were teaching as part of the Great Society in the projects and what you discovered.
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rockauto.com I'm back with author and scholar Shelby Steele, who together with his son has made a terrific film, What Killed Michael Brown?
Shelby, in the movie, you talk about how you were on the left and you were actually part of the Great Society and you were offering educational programs to blacks in housing projects.
And then you made kind of a startling discovery which contrasted with your own experience.
Your own experience was that you were hungry for knowledge.
You were looking for the opportunity to learn.
What did you discover when you approached the projects with all this knowledge to offer?
What did you find out? Well, I found out many things, I suppose.
It was a sort of an initiation for me in my thinking about things and about the way the world works, really works, rather than what I sort of had idealistically thought.
And, you know, money was put on the table.
Suddenly this guilty government that we lived with began to just shower us with money.
And we could write a grant on one afternoon and get $50,000 for a library.
That would end up with about 12 actual books in it.
But people were doing rather well.
The director of the program drove a Mercedes Benz, lived in a very nice suburban neighborhood, and so forth.
So I grew up and found that the The opportunism of people, the quickness with which they would sell out their idealism for an opportunity to get ahead to make money and so forth, and the fact that poverty was evolving into a money-making industry.
That people were mainly whites, who were at the top, who were getting the contracts to build the public housing, who were taking over the educational system, so forth and so on.
Down at the bottom, we were getting a few little peanuts and some payoffs, which seemed like a great deal, but it was, again, a formula That ended up becoming a new oppression,
a new black oppression, a new way of squelching our ambitions to evolve, to develop, of saying that that development was a sucker's game, was a hustle, and everything became dark and cynical.
All the way down to human relations and relationships.
Because we were sort of dirty, our hands were dirty.
And again, as I mentioned in the film, I had a colleague who, his theory, he taught literature.
And his theory was that his students only had to read one book a month.
Because they learned more in the streets.
And of course, the overseers of our program said, well, that's fine.
That makes perfect sense.
So what you're doing is telling a kid whose only possibility in life is to be in school that he doesn't even have to come and you'll give him a grade anyway.
So everything became...
It's amazing the way corruption infuses an institution.
Pretty soon, there's no escaping it.
To do any sort of business, you're basically selling out the values that brought you there in the first place.
So I grew up very quickly.
And after three years of that, I moved on.
And I understood there was no way in that situation to get ahead.
And then if you tried to say, no, I'm going to actually teach a real class here, then your colleagues would turn on you.
You know, this is a hustle.
And so this great, you look at that moment of the civil rights victory, the March of 63 and Martin Luther King and the glory, the moral beauty of that moment, the sense of long injustice resolved.
And then you look at six months later as the government became more and more involved And put money here and put money there.
Not enough to really do anything, but enough except to corrupt everybody.
Your explaining shall be something that has puzzled me for a long time, namely this colorblind idea, which was not merely Martin Luther King's dream from his I Have a Dream speech, but was enshrined in the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
It's such a powerful idea, and yet if I had to give it a lifespan, I would say its lifespan was less than five years.
In other words, by, of course, in 1965, one year later, LBJ gave his famous Howard University speech, basically saying that the colorblind approach was insufficient.
Then, of course, Nixon comes in in 68.
By 69, you have the Philadelphia Plan, pretty soon affirmative action, it metastasizes in the 70s.
So, this notion of sort of not paying attention to race, of judging people as individuals, it had such a brief life that, But I guess the reason for it, you're saying, is that neither side really wanted it.
There was too much money to be made on the one hand for opportunistic black leaders, and there were white leaders only too eager to pay, and that became the name of the game, and somehow the ideal of race neutrality, the idea of taking a group that has been behind and finding ways to develop, all that kind of went out the window.
Yes, yes. Race became a currency, currency of power.
And so we had just spent the first half of the 20th century fighting against race as a means to power.
Here we finally, we found that given white guilt, it could be a little, give us a little power, a little juice.
A little money here and there, a little advantage here and there.
And it was like we were really getting something that we deserved.
And without really understanding that, you know, we sold our soul.
And so the programs all failed.
They all failed.
I can't think of any exceptions to programs that came out of that milieu that really succeeded.
They all failed.
They introduced our students.
They took away the innocence of our students.
And they began to then say, well, this college is going to open up for me, so I'm going to go on the basis of my race.
Here again, 50 years we've been saying, see us as human beings.
Now we're saying, okay, there's money in it, see me as a black.
See my race as something that you must pay tribute to, that you must honor.
And so we then, as Black, we began to say, well, we'll use our race to move ahead in American life.
The most profound mistake we could possibly make was to see race in power, or power in race, excuse me.
And we sold ourselves out in that sort of, and again, Follows through to this very day, to this very moment.
Now we're playing the game of, we call it, diversity and inclusion and unconscious bias and intersectionality and all these sorts of hustles.
They're hustles.
They're ways that we work white guilt.
We still know whites are slowly waking up.
But they're not there yet.
And they're still scared to death that they're going to be seen as racist.
It's our chance. It's our opportunity.
We can shake them down.
We have a whole...
The upper middle class of Black America are pretty much shakedown people who come to a corporation and say, you need an HR department.
And you need me to be your diversity director.
And I charge this once a year and so forth.
And what do these institutions, they roll right over?
They don't say that we're a colorblind society or we're a colorblind institution.
They wouldn't say that for all the tea in China.
They throw out anybody who says that.
They marginalize people like myself who say that and keep that message away because they want to do business.
And this is the tragedy.
Someday it will be seen, I think.
I don't know if I'll see it, but someday it will.
Shelby, when we come back, let's wrap up by sort of summing up the hustle of critical race theory and pointing to what perhaps we could call the road not taken, which is an alternative path that is always available if only we can get ourselves out of this twisted psychology and look for some real solutions when we come right back.
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We're back for our concluding segment with Shelby Steele.
Shelby, you mentioned critical race theory, which really seems to be kind of based on an idea which, frankly, seems nonsensical to me, that if you have an institution that produces disproportionate outcomes, it is therefore systemically racist.
Because it seems to me if you apply that logic, then the NBA, the National Basketball Association, is systemically racist.
It's actively discriminating against Asian Americans, for example, or Jews who are hardly ever to be found on the court.
How did this kind of...
Nonsense logic, if you will.
The world of Alice in Wonderland come to be seen as sensible by otherwise thoughtful, educated people who are not normally known to run around like crazy people.
I think that happened because it was a way to prove innocence.
It was a way out of the accusation that this institution is racist and therefore illegitimate, morally illegitimate.
And so critical race theory is you can just sort of pace that over whatever you're doing And claim that you are, again, on the side of the good, that you are innocent of racism and that your whole focus in your institution is to end racism.
So it's a way that Again, you mentioned the disparities between the races.
Critical race theory is a way we take that disparity, that weakness that comes from the fact that we're not fully developed yet.
We blame that on racism.
We say that the reason there is this disparity is because America is a racist society and all of its institutions are racist.
We, in a sense, turn our weakness into a strength.
We turn it into a currency of power.
Our weakness is what recommends us in American life.
The fact that we are not competitive yet, that every other group does better in school and so forth than we do.
Well, that's just a measure of the severity of oppression we still live with.
And therefore, pay me off.
And that's the corruption.
Shelby, you mentioned underdevelopment, and this is customarily blamed on slavery, on segregation.
When I look at probably the single biggest index or indicator of underdevelopment, it would seem to me the breakdown of the black family.
Now, the white family isn't doing that great either.
But you've got this black family structure and people think, I think, almost instinctively, well, that's got to be due to slavery because under slavery, masters could separate parents and they could sell off children and so on.
But isn't it a fact that for most of the 20th century, blacks had done a heroic job of restoring families and holding families together like your family and That the real breakdown of the black family occurred starting in the late 1960s.
In other words, a lot of the pathologies that we see in the inner city, coming back to what killed Michael Brown, is the fact that you've got these inner cities, and by the way, they've been run by the Democrats now for well over half a century.
Isn't it the case that liberal policies in some ways have done more, certainly to harm the black family, but maybe to cause the overall pathologies of the inner city than ancestral racism?
Absolutely. I think those things have invaded the black community and, in a sense, taken it over, colonized it.
Liberalism has sort of colonized us.
Giving us a bunch of, ask us to believe in everything but ourselves.
Never should we bet on ourselves because we'll lose because of racism.
So it is this sort of ugly collaboration between the moral anxiety of white America and the fear of freedom in black America.
And it's a way we sort of mix these two things to sort of mutually support them.
And if you're not in that sort of symbiotic connection, then you are like, let's say, a black conservative.
You have nobody to pay off.
You have nowhere to turn, nowhere to go.
I'm sure maybe there is, but I don't know in all of history where there's been a more insidious sort of connection between groups in a single society than white and black America.
It's really terrible because we then undermine morality in the white community.
The white community realizes it's just paying off for past sins.
It's not developing anybody.
If whites were really honest about development, they would say, we'll give you.
We'll make sure the schools are better, and we will actually ask something of you.
You know the corruption is there because there's never an ask.
Yes, you're going to get affirmative action and you're going to find yourself on the campus at Harvard University when you wouldn't otherwise be here.
But the only way you can stay here is to get a B plus average.
If you get just a B average, you're out.
I would love to see that.
When you actually ask performance from the people you claim to be helping.
What we did, public housing, school, on and on.
All the things that we did, we asked nothing.
We weren't concerned with the people.
So once again, history repeats itself.
We suffer from the blindness of white people, the callousness, the indifference.
If they cared about us, they'd ask something.
That's always my test.
Where's the ask?
Shelby, this has been incredibly enlightening.
Folks, you've been listening to one of the most insightful dissectors of race in America.
And it's all in this movie, What Killed Michael Brown?
The movie, by the way, is playing on SalemNow.com.
So you should go to watch...
It's SalemNow.com and use code Dinesh.
Dinesh is actually a way to get a little discount on watching the movie, but watch it with your family.
I think you'll find it very eye-opening.
Shelby, thanks for joining me on the program.
This has really been great.
Well, Dinesh, thanks so much for having me.
I appreciate it. Some witnesses have also said that they actually saw you stand over him.
That would be incorrect. What did you see in that face?
Aggression. There was nothing.
It was like Hollow just looking through me.
What demons might have been at work within him and to make the final fateful charge against Officer Wilson?
America's original sin is not slavery.
It is simply the use of race as a means to power.
When truth becomes the lie, and when the lie becomes truth.
If Michael Brown valued his life, he wouldn't take the chance of risking it.
Was it really racism that killed Michael Brown?
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